Is $300 equal to $8000? No, no, no, no.. The Oppo is a Universal player. Again, again, even against the $300 refurb price of the S1, I would not be compelled to upgrade. The Oppo Beta version had jaggies.. A video artifact. on the Oppo is bad. With respect to CD's the Krell 250/2 in my opinion is a better CD player that is years older and could be bought on Ebay for $1500. Then again, I would see no reason to buy the Oppo. In my opinion, yes these are extreme comparisons, but people with decent CD only players, SHOULD then IMO not intend to try to buy a Universal player, but a player that plays the SINGLE format that they want.

The Oppo is NOT in beta anymore and does not suffer from jaggies as you say. It is very good at everything it does. Spend more, all you want to be an elitist but the difference comes to a point of diminishing returns once you get above the Oppo level of price.

__________________Anthem, Conrad Johnson, Dish Network/JVC, Dynaudio, Infinity, Integra, JL Audio, Klipsch, Magnepan, Marantz, Martin Logan, Onkyo, Oppo, Outlaw Audio, Panasonic, Paradigm, REL, Sumiko, SVSound, and Toshiba are the brands equipment I currently use. I have owned/used and tested equipment made by just about any manufacturer you can name.

you'll eventually need a bluray player, so just buy one when you can afford it. hdmi to dvi will look great, but in the future some discs may require hdmi to hdmi for the handshake to work, and then you wouldn't get a picture.

I never really got into DVD-A, and don't have a player capable of playing DVD-A via HDMI.
I'm basing my opinion off of BR which I think sounds better in digital multi-channel than analog.

Honestly its splitting hairs between the two right now.
When real multi channel music on Bluray comes out, we can debate some more, but for movie soundtracks it's really no difference.

BTW ever wonder why no "high end" audio company has yet to put out a serious HDMI based system?
The amount of jitter that interface generates drives the audio engineers nuts.
Too much time and $$$ invested in getting setups like i-link finally sounding real good and HDMI comes along and throws the audio advancements back 10 years.

Honestly its splitting hairs between the two right now.
When real multi channel music on Bluray comes out, we can debate some more, but for movie soundtracks it's really no difference.

BTW ever wonder why no "high end" audio company has yet to put out a serious HDMI based system?
The amount of jitter that interface generates drives the audio engineers nuts.
Too much time and $$$ invested in getting setups like i-link finally sounding real good and HDMI comes along and throws the audio advancements back 10 years.

Who exactly are you considering high-end companies?
And, what are you calling "a serious HDMI based system" ?